Email marketing can be one of the best tools for connecting with customers, increasing engagement, and building brand loyalty. A 2017 survey from the Direct Marketing Association showed that the average return on investment for email marketing is about $ 30 for every $ 1 spent.

When done right, an email marketing campaign can help your business to reach its goals. When it is poorly executed, your emails might end up irritating customers and driving them away. The following five steps will assist you in fully optimizing your email marketing for success.

Set Goals

Every email needs a clear purpose. Think about why you are sending the email and what you want the reader to take away from it. Are you trying to get them to buy a new product? Are you promoting a new service or feature? Does your business have news that you want to share with customers?

When you have a clear, definable goal, it makes it much easier to develop email content that will help you to achieve that goal. You want the goal to be as specific as possible, and you want to define the action that you would like the reader to take after reading the email.

Define Success

Once you know what your goal is, you need to determine how you are going to measure your success. You have several points you could consider. Things like conversions and click-through rates are obvious metrics that can help to define success, but don’t forget about the simpler metrics, like the inbox rate.

If your emails are not landing in inboxes, they have no chance of meeting any of their goals, which might be a signal that you need to work on your email verification process. Use an email address verification tool or other technique to ensure you’re making it into inboxes, and avoiding the repercussions when you don’t (e.g. being blocked by your email service provider).

Develop Good Subject Lines

The subject line is one of the most important factors for success with email marketing. Approximately 47% of email users say that they will open an email based on the subject line alone. What is arguably more important is that 69% of email users said that they would report an email as spam just based on the subject line.

When it comes to creating a good subject line, you want to aim for something that is compelling to the reader while also making sure that it connects with the content of the email. A good subject line can get recipients to open the email, but they may not stick with it if they feel like the subject line tricked them into opening it.

Be Concise

When a person is on the internet, they have a wide variety of things competing for their attention. If a reader feels like your email is taking too long to read, they might give up and move on to something else. You want your emails to deliver the intended message as quickly as possible.

When you write email content, aim for simplicity and try to keep things short. Even after the initial draft is written, read it back and try to edit it down as much as possible. You may even want to share the email with a friend or colleague before sending it out. A second person might be able to spot some ways that the content could be more direct.

Be Mobile-Friendly

Many of your email recipients will experience the email on a mobile device. In fact, 55% of all emails are opened on a mobile device. If your emails are not mobile-friendly, you are not providing a good experience to over half the people that are likely to receive them.

You want your emails to adapt to your mobile clients. You should try to keep your paragraphs short and make sure you lay out your emails in a way that makes them easy to scan. Before you start writing any marketing email, you should develop a template or format that will work well for mobile users.